Who are the real April fools? Pigs or the people who roast them?

::::::::

Remember that Martian who landed on the lawn of Our Nation's Capitol in my previous blog ("Some SCOTUS Photos," March 27, 2012)? The one who noticed that the people with dark skin were rallying for something different than the ones with the light skin wanted?

He asked me about other important features of our Western civilization that concern me. He said that on his planet people have every skin color imaginable, like the Muppets, and there is no discrimination on that basis.

I did not think to ask him if there were other bases for Martian discrimination.

I told him about the shrinking electorate and all those people, including bribed Democrats, who are working to disenfranchise underprivileged minorities. That those controlling this process represent a minute fraction of our population doesn't seem to make a difference.

I wondered what perspective he might lend to this atrocity.

He said that it seemed to him as though those holding the strings of our society want to pull us back to another era when only a few people had the vote.

One such era, it occurred to me, was at the dawn of our nation's history, when only rich people, with light skin, were allowed to vote--"rich" in this case meaning those with property, even an ass, as Ben Franklin liked to joke.

But this situation did not last long. Soon all taxpayers acquired the right to vote; then veterans, then immigrants, and then even former slaves, people with dark skin.

Then, when women began to agitate for this right, things started going downhill, despite the Fifteenth Amendment and even the Nineteenth Amendment, which took a while to come about thereafter.

So that the vote extended to the largest variety of people a bit past the middle of the nineteenth century, as the industrial age began to supplant the agrarian age.

The most varieties of people, and perhaps a higher percentage of the people, but I can't promise this.

What I can say with confidence is that there is a larger variety of ways to disenfranchise people in this country these days than there are varieties to discriminate against, and that's saying a lot, because there is such a multitude of nationalities and ethnicities who have arrived here recently, reaching for the good life depicted in reruns of old TV shows and old Hollywood movies that get passed around all over the world, even to people living under Stone Age circumstances in SubSaharan Africa.

iPods and iPads have come there, too. Their Stone Age really rocks [bad pun].

*****

"If only rich people vote, then only rich people will be in office," noted my green friend. "What will happen to everybody else? They'd be treated better on Mars, where there is no such thing as rich or poor. Every year we put all of our possessions together and split them up with complete parity, blindfolded. No one ever heard of money."

But if the rich people put the rest of us on a spaceship to Mars, could they do without us, I wondered, not wanting to overchallenge my friend, who couldn't wait to get back on his spaceship and leave this zoological Inferno.

What would happen is that the rich people would divide themselves up into classes based on exactly how rich they were. The lower class would consist of those who earned less than $1 million a year, I supposed. $250,000 to $1 million, to be more exact. The rest of us would be gone. They wouldn't know the difference. They'd be too busy concentrating on amounts of melanin in their skin and things like that.

What would we 99 percent do when we got to Mars? Promptly pollute their pristine civilization with the warped priorities that plague all of us, still in the grips of the American dream?

"I've decided to uninvite the 99 percent of Americans who are not super-rich from coming to Mars," said my green friend, tipping his hat as he headed back for his flying saucer, which no one had noticed.

"You're welcome to visit anytime," he added, though without a great deal of conviction. He was just being polite.

*****

We need more naïve objectivity to show us what we are doing besides creating a slippery slope to hell.

My friend's flying saucer rose quickly into the atmosphere. I knew he was going at full speed. Why did no one else even notice? I wasn't imagining things.

It's just that what's happening here is beyond imagination. And we're wasting a lot of time and money. Why not just rescind those articles in the Bill of Rights that extend the vote to minorities? Instead, every technique possible is being used to disenfranchise people. And those who don't want this to happen are slapping a few wrists with their palms flat, palms that are quickly filled with bribes.

Shall I list the ways in which disenfranchisement is spreading over this country like lava eructed from a live volcano?

One: Violation of all of the Bill of Rights amendments pertaining to voting rights.

Two: Proliferation of electronic machinery that is permeable to a huge variety of corruption, both built-in and externally stimulated.

Three: Long, fabricated lists of people who are not allowed to vote because they may have a name similar to a felon's somewhere in this country, or the name on the registration list may not match a name on other government lists because it is hard to spell or has been changed or lacks a middle initial.

Four: New laws that require lists of new registrants to be handed in within forty-eight hours or else (otherwise large amounts of money will be charged).

Five: Forms of caging, including robocalls that tell people that Election Day has been moved to Wednesday or that it has been canceled or is open only to people whose names begin with A- to L-, etc.; Sending notices to people bound not to be accessible because of foreclosure or service in the military or change of address (notices are marked "do not forward"); Distributing leaflets warning that people with unpaid parking tickets will be arrested if they try to vote; etc.

Five: Harassment of people at the polls on Election Day by people with cameras, disguised as police or CIA staked out in cars with blacked-out windows.

Six: Other forms of harassment of people of color, including early closing of polls, late opening, street barriers, sending away first-time voters.

Seven: Extreme legislation requiring government-issued photo IDs that 11 percent of the population now lack and making it impossible for them to obtain them.

Eight: Attempted introduction of the most corruptible election systems of all, Internet voting.

Nine: Creation of all sorts of roadblocks at the polls in impoverished neighborhoods that hold up lines for hours.

Ten: Provision of too few voting machines in these same neighborhoods to make voting even more difficult.

Eleven: Violation of the Motor Voter Act by not reminding potential voters that they can register at places where they collect entitlements or driver's licenses, which brings us back to

Twelve: Violation of all of the Bill of Rights, which amounts to

Thirteen: Violation of the U.S. Constitution, which required so many amendments in order to provide all of the basic human rights we are struggling to hang on to today.

 *****

Have I left anything out? Paying meteorologists to seed clouds on Election Day to bring bad weather to impoverished neighborhoods? Undoubtedly I have instead merely scratched the surface.

  *****  

My green friend is gone; as his flying saucer heads home, rotation is happening elsewhere, of question marks around my head.

Why bother fighting back when every problem in this country is these days solved with a hand gun, and abroad with WMD?

I think I'll train to become an astronaut and then go explore the universe for a planet as enlightened as Mars that will accept us 99 percent and cleanse us of the American Dream.

( c )

Authors Website: http://www.wordsunltd.com

Authors Bio:

Marta Steele is an author/editor/blogger who has been writing for Opednews.com since 2006. She is also author of the 2012 book "Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols: The Election Integrity Movement's Nonstop Battle to Win Back the People's Vote, 2000-2008" (Columbus, Free Press) and a member of the Election Integrity movement since 2001. Her original website, WordsUnLtd.com, first entered the blogosphere in 2003. She recently became a senior editor for Opednews.com. She has in the past taught college and worked as a full-time as well as freelance reporter. She has been a peace and election integrity activist since 1999. Her undergraduate and graduate educational background are in Spanish, classical philology, and historical and comparative linguistics. Her biography is most recently listed in "Who's Who in America" 2019 and in 2018 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Who's Who.